Since I’ve been reading through the Greek psalms recently, I’ve been curious about how the Fathers read the Psalms. John Chrysostom is probably the most notable of the early Greek Fathers, so I naturally turned to him first. The wikipedia page informed me that he wrote homilies on the Psalms, and that many of them are extant, but it didn’t give me a list of what Psalms he commented on! I was then even more surprised to find out that no one has done a critical text of his homilies on the Psalms. They have been translated into English. There is a list of the extant homilies in the in that product description, but I didn’t see that my first go around ;-).
Still curious to see which ones he commented on, I stumbled about a PDF of the work from Migne’s Patrologia Graeca. (HT Roger Pearse). The PDF is pretty good, from a cursory glance. It had been OCR’ed, so it was searchable! I believe it was a Russian group who did the scanning, so huge props to them! Unfortunately, there was not a table of contents, and the titles for each Psalm where in Greek numerals (think Roman numerals with a Greek twist). However, I was able to whip up a nice Ruby script to give me the information I wanted. I’m thinking of creating either a series of PDFs (one per psalm), or just redoing the entire PDF with a table of contents and Arabic numerals.
I did find a few oddities in the PDF. Psalms 9-12 got inserted twice, as best as I could tell. Also, the OCR didn’t seem to like the digammas which were used in the numerals. The digamma is a Greek letter that was largely obsolete by the classical period, but it has hung around as a numeral. Also, I’ve noticed a discrepancy with that product description of the English translation. It states that “Psalms 4-13, 44-50, and Volume Two contains commentaries on Psalms 109-150 (with the exception of the long Ps 119)” are commented on. It looks like that misses Psalm 41 (Hebrew 42), which Chrysostom also commented on. Also note that the English translation follows the Hebrew numbers.
Either way, here’s the list of Psalms that John Chrysostom commented on, with both the LXX chapter number and the Hebrew (English) chapter number. If I do any more work with them, I’ll post something.
4 (LXX) – 4 (Hebrew)
5 (LXX) – 5 (Hebrew)
6 (LXX) – 6 (Hebrew)
7 (LXX) – 7 (Hebrew)
8 (LXX) – 8 (Hebrew)
9 (LXX) – 9-10 (Hebrew)
10 (LXX) – 11 (Hebrew)
11 (LXX) – 12 (Hebrew)
12 (LXX) – 13 (Hebrew)
9 (LXX) – 9-10 (Hebrew)
10 (LXX) – 11 (Hebrew)
11 (LXX) – 12 (Hebrew)
12 (LXX) – 13 (Hebrew)
41 (LXX) – 42 (Hebrew)
43 (LXX) – 44 (Hebrew)
44 (LXX) – 45 (Hebrew)
45 (LXX) – 46 (Hebrew)
46 (LXX) – 47 (Hebrew)
47 (LXX) – 48 (Hebrew)
48 (LXX) – 49 (Hebrew)
49 (LXX) – 50 (Hebrew)
108 (LXX) – 109 (Hebrew)
109 (LXX) – 110 (Hebrew)
110 (LXX) – 111 (Hebrew)
111 (LXX) – 112 (Hebrew)
112 (LXX) – 113 (Hebrew)
113 (LXX) – 114-115 (Hebrew)
114 (LXX) – 116:1-9 (Hebrew)
115 (LXX) – 116:10-19 (Hebrew)
116 (LXX) – 117 (Hebrew)
117 (LXX) – 118 (Hebrew)
119 (LXX) – 120 (Hebrew)
120 (LXX) – 121 (Hebrew)
121 (LXX) – 122 (Hebrew)
122 (LXX) – 123 (Hebrew)
123 (LXX) – 124 (Hebrew)
124 (LXX) – 125 (Hebrew)
125 (LXX) – 126 (Hebrew)
126 (LXX) – 127 (Hebrew)
127 (LXX) – 128 (Hebrew)
128 (LXX) – 129 (Hebrew)
129 (LXX) – 130 (Hebrew)
130 (LXX) – 131 (Hebrew)
131 (LXX) – 132 (Hebrew)
132 (LXX) – 133 (Hebrew)
133 (LXX) – 134 (Hebrew)
134 (LXX) – 135 (Hebrew)
135 (LXX) – 136 (Hebrew)
136 (LXX) – 137 (Hebrew)
137 (LXX) – 138 (Hebrew)
138 (LXX) – 139 (Hebrew)
139 (LXX) – 140 (Hebrew)
140 (LXX) – 141 (Hebrew)
141 (LXX) – 142 (Hebrew)
142 (LXX) – 143 (Hebrew)
143 (LXX) – 144 (Hebrew)
144 (LXX) – 145 (Hebrew)
145 (LXX) – 146 (Hebrew)
146 (LXX) – 147 (Hebrew)
147 (LXX) – 147:12-20 (Hebrew)
148 (LXX) – 148 (Hebrew)
149 (LXX) – 149 (Hebrew)
150 (LXX) – 150 (Hebrew)
Alex Poulos, PhD 
I would have gone here for a copy of Migne’s text. DCA is a great resource on the web, and it’s where I sourced my text for working on Chrysostom’s homilies on John.
Always glad to hear people getting into some Chrysostom!
ps, there is often not a critical text of chrysostom, so far as I know
I should have thought to look there! I’ve been over there before, although my Latin is bad enough to make navigation difficult ;-). I also don’t remember being thrilled by the scan qualtity, though perhaps it varies (or I’m just too picky ;-)). Are they just image scans or have they been OCR’ed and searchable?
Venturing into the world of Patristics has made me appreciate just how much textual criticism still needs to be done. I can understand how some works wouldn’t have gotten the attention, but it seems like Chrysostom on the Psalms would’ve made been done already. The French “sources chretiennes” series has done a lot of his other work.
I’m assuming you’ve already looked at this text:
http://www.ecrater.com/p/2414871/commentary-on-the-psalms-2-volumes-john
Mike: Indeed! I linked to it in the first paragraph, though the link isn’t immediately apparent.